In Fort Morgan, local markets connect the Somali community
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FORT MORGAN, Colo. — A couple blocks away from Fort Morgan’s Main Street, a small market draws dozens of Somali residents each week in search of familiar flavors, clothing, cookware and other cultural essentials.
It’s called Midnimo Grocery Store. In Somali, midnimo means unity.
“Owning a business here after working eight years for Cargill… It's very nice. I’m very happy. Cargill… heavy work,” said Abdi Hakim, who has owned and operated the market for a decade.
Hakim arrived in the United States in 2007 as a refugee from Somalia, fleeing the country’s civil war that began in 1991. He worked at Cargill, one of the largest beef processors in North America, for eight years prior to becoming a business owner. This is the reality for many of the Somali refugees who relocated to Fort Morgan and took up jobs at the meatpacking plants.
According to the most recent data, in 2018, the city had a population of about 15,000 people — nearly eight percent, or 1,200, of which were Somali refugees. Hundreds of Somali refugees worked for Cargill.
Somali Americans are the latest target of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies and rhetoric. During a cabinet meeting this week, Trump made hateful comments about Somali immigrants, calling them “garbage.” The president also threatened to strip temporary legal protections from Somali migrants living in Minnesota, the state with the largest population of Somalis in the U.S. In Minneapolis, some Somali Americans said they are afraid to leave their homes.
Hakim immigrated to the United States to flee violence.
“Our country had conflict between clans, so we moved countries. But before that, people had good [jobs] in Somalia. We had government. When they began fighting, many people left the country,” Hakim said.
Somalia’s civil war has a long and complicated history. The region endured overlapping colonization by Britain, France, Italy, and Ethiopian imperial forces, but Ethan Sanders, an African history professor at Regis University in Denver, notes that the deeper fractures emerged after independence in 1960 due to individual power struggles and competing clan interests.
“The colonial power structures and laws did exacerbate tensions,” he said. “But before this there were already lots of tensions among Somali peoples to be worked out: tensions between northern nomads vs. southern cultivators, modernist southerners vs. traditionalist northerners, pro-western Somalis vs. pro-Arab Somalis, what script should be used for national language, new social classes etc. — all of which created a diverse set of political attachments that complicated the transition to creating a new nation-state.”
Sanders added that the new independent government created new spoils for these groups to fight over, and it was a series of bad political decisions that did the most damage to the brand new state.
Somalis have been fleeing their country following the fall of dictator Siad Barre in 1991, which intensified clan fighting, a broader civil war and the rise of the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group. Since then, several hundred thousand to a million have been killed from the ongoing violence and famine and 3.8 million people have been displaced.
In Fort Morgan, being surrounded by other Somalis provides a sense of community for Hakim and others.
“It feels better with [a] big Somali community here because we get a job. We get money. Some people get business," Hakim said. “People… they buy here and they cook at their homes.”
Next door, to the left of Hakim’s market is Somali Restaurant and Grocery, which sells halal food and groceries. On the weekends, you will find Hashim Mohamud, 34, working the front. He says the store sees about 100 customers a week, most of whom are Somali. On weekdays, he is a truck driver, driving across state lines.
Mohamud came to the United States in 2013 and worked at Cargill for five years. He was born on the border of Somalia and Kenya and was living in Dadaab by the time he was one. Dadaab is a large refugee complex located in the north eastern region of Kenya, established in 1991 by the U.N. for Somalis fleeing war and drought. He hasn’t been back to his homeland since 1991.
“At that time, I was young when we moved to Dadaab. So my parents told me it was because of the violence,” Mohamud said. “Here, I like Fort Morgan because the first time I came to the United States, I started work with Cargill. They train you. Now, I am a truck driver. I left Cargill because I was just interested in trucks.”
Mohamud enjoys the quiet of the small city and doesn’t like it where it is crowded by too many people.
Both Mohamud and Hakim, when they are running and working at their respective stores next door to each other, lock the stores up five times a day to go pray at a mosque half a mile away. On Fridays, Hakim says he sees as many as 200 people there praying. When they worked for Cargill, they both remember a small mosque at the plant where the muslim workers would pray.
Three times a week, Ali Elmi, who has lived in Fort Morgan since 2010, shops at the two Somali stores. He buys goat meat, rice and other groceries.
“I came from Minneapolis. I moved here seeking jobs, opportunity and better weather,” Elmi said, referencing the bitter cold in Minnesota. “Here, even though there’s snow. It melts quick from the ground.”
Elmi worked for Cargill for more than 10 years and was part of their union. Now, he works as an Uber driver, servicing people from Denver, Brighton, West Minister, Loveland, Boulder, Greeley and other parts of the metro area.
“I wouldn’t say it’s easy for the Somali community when they work at Cargill. In the warehouse, it’s not easy. It’s very difficult,” he said. “Still the Somali survive… They try to understand how the United States is and how to do their jobs because they feed their families in Somalia… they send them money for food and medication.”
He goes to Somalia often to visit his mother and his childhood friends for months at a time, he said.
“It’s not like what it used to be before. Right now, there is more stability,” he said. “They have a government, they provide education, they have more peace than before. Before it was horrible. Now, people try to build up the communities and the government. Now they have law and order.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.